It is an untraditional play, because of the songs and the song lyrics. I believe the language that is used comes straight out of the 1970's era because it's bold and feminist. The language isn't offending but there are sexual references made throughout the play itself and especially within the song numbers. I feel that the references made to the sexual organs in the play, for example “cunt” are used to shock the audience, most of the poems are used to shock and appal the audience to let them sympathise with women and to make them sit up and listen. This technique works effectively and helps the audience realise the seriousness of the issues. The musical interludes of Vinegar Tom accomplish the feminist goal of disturbing the linear action of the play. While the play is set in seventeenth-century England and concerns the serious subject of witch craft, the several modern songs disrupt the traditional flow of the action, sung by people in modern dress and not intended as part of the action.
The use of Language Carol Churchill uses are different types of language throughout the play to give it depth and to display the emotions of the characters in Vinegar Tom. This can be seen from the offset of the play in which Alice talks to the man. The man's opening line is; 'am I the devil?' asked to Alice. She does not seem to understand and so he continues, 'I'm the devil. Man in black they say,' the man would seem to lack confidence and this is something Churchill builds on in the next few lines; 'Have I not got great burning eyes then?' 'Is my body not rough and hairy?' 'Didn't it hurt you? Are you saying it didn't hurt you?' He clearly has a low self esteem and is self conscious of in the way he looks and the size of his penis. Churchill communicates with language that he likes to be in control, and that he is perhaps slightly unstable.
PACKER: Why won't you confess and make this shorter?
ALICE: I want my boy.
PACKER: Then you should have stayed at home at night with him and not gone out after the devil.
ALICE: I want him.
PACKER: How could a woman be a filthy witch and put her child in danger?
ALICE: I didn't.
PACKER: Night after night, it's well known.
ALICE: But what's going to happen to him? He's only got me.
PACKER: He should have a father. (P1 171)
Analysis of this passage from Vinegar Tom reveals her feminist commentary and dramatic message: the short, clipped, and emotionally restrained language of Alice compared to the longer, emotionally even and controlled language of Packer, signifying the conflict between and within the characters. The questioning pushes Alice to an emotional breaking point as she bursts forth with need and desperation in her last and longest line.
“Evil Women
Is that what you want?
Is that what you want to see?
On the movie screen
Of your wet dream
Evil Women
Evil Women
Is that what you want?
Is that what you want to see?
In your movie dream
Do they scream and scream?
Evil Women
Evil Women”
These lyrics are another example from the song that ends Carol Churchill’s Vinegar Tom. They are confrontational and force the audience to sit up and take notice, Vinegar Tom is a play that is as much about 1976, the year it was written, as it is about 1676. As a product of the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, the play takes part in a larger project: the efforts on the part of women to reclaim the stages of spectacle culture from the control of a patriarchal society. In this larger project, we can find liberation of spectacle from its emphasis on "evil women" to an emphasis on the social conditions that would render women evil in the first place and cause popular audiences to take pleasure in their "screams." By making a spectacle of such a society, Vinegar Tom makes visible that which contemporary culture continues to hide from itself: the fact of its repressed and repressive sexuality. In conclusion I feel Carol Churchill has succeeded in generating the response she wanted from the audience by using the language so effectively.
